CHAPTER VIII

TOUCH AND THE APPRECIATION OF THINGS

"Life is response to the order of nature." The measure of life, we might almost say, is sensitiveness to nature. The ancient psalmist has majestically catalogued nature's contents, the heavens, the earth, and the great wide sea wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts; the chariot clouds, the wings of the wind, the springs of the valley, the fowls of the firmament, the voice of the thunder, the grass for the cattle, the cedars of Lebanon.

The scientist, in language more prosaic but still poetically suggestive, describes nature in terms of the incessant forces of gravity, atoms, electrons, and tenuous waves of ether dancing through space at the rate of hundreds of billions per second. Our sense perceptions are the feelings which correspond to these varied objects and energies in nature, "whose radiant activity enfolds us all."

The whole body of the amoeba is sensitive to contact, mechanical jars, light, heat, chemical and electrical stimuli. In creatures as humble as the hydra and the sea anemone there are special sensory nerve cells placed between the environment and the responding muscles of the organism. These sense cells are triggerlike devices which furnish the cue for responses and make them more prompt, certain, and varied. In the jellyfish there are special sense organs, eight clusters of them around the rim, for the light, chemical, and pressure senses. If these sense bodies are removed,

the animal will no longer pulsate spontaneously, — which goes to prove the fundamental importance of sensation. Genetically, the sense organs preceded the development of the brain.

The sensory-motor elements of the nervous system are the most primitive, both in function and structure; but very early in the animal scale the locomotor system becomes sufficiently complex to require a central "adjustor." The natural place for this adjustor is in the head, the part that is foremost in all crawling, climbing, fleeing, and fighting. Thus even the earthworm carries a brain in his head.

The general character of any brain varies with the sensory equipment and the environment of the animal. Take the turtle he lives in a world of odors; scent is all important in his life economy; his brain consists chiefly of two big, bulging olfactory lobes. In man, smell is "a fallen angel"; the olfactory lobes have dwindled to the size of a bean, and the bulge of our brain has a different reason, though possibly not a different origin, for Meynert has suggested that our cerebral cortex has its genesis in the olfactory lobes. In any case the organization and development of our cortex are indissolubly connected with the use of our sensory apparatus. It is the central switchboard, or adjustor, on which every sensitive point of our body is represented. The cortex is not only a sensorium, but it is so fundamentally a sensorium that its vigor and refinement depend primarily upon the sense impressions which have modified its structure. The degree in which our minds will be athletic and æsthetic depends upon what we have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched.

The oldest, biggest, and most fundamental end organ we have is our sensitive skin, — 1,584,300 square millimeters in extent. Woods Hutchinson has called the human skin one

of the wonders of the world,—"a tissue more beautiful than velvet, more pliable than silk, more durable under exposure than steel." Havelock Ellis describes it as "the archæological field of human and prehuman experience, the foundation upon which all forms of sensory perception have grown up." Indefatigable explorers like Weber, Frey, and Goldscheider have devoted a good part of their lives to the investigation of this archæological field. They have used the most ingenious and refined methods of experimental science for the discovery and mapping out of its many wonders.

The amoeba has no skin, but it is altogether possible that even in the amoeba the peripheral protoplasm, or the part nearest to the environment, is especially sensitive to stimuli. If the amoeba has a stream of consciousness, it may well be because of some rudimentary contact-awareness, which Spencer considers the most primitive psychic phenomenon. Certain it is that almost as soon as nature begins to multiply and differentiate the cells in a single organism the ectoderm becomes especially sensitive to contact and pressure. Thus even in the skin of the hydra and sea anemone and in the outer covering of earthworm, frog, and lizard are scattered many sense cells. Ages and ages before man appeared upon the face of the earth there were "multifarious experiences with hardness." Hall enumerates in a suggestive way how "bottom creatures love crevices, develop responses to points, curves, compression, changes of permeability, cohesion, thickening, squeezing into holes, cracks, hugging against each other." In mammals, hairs become the instruments of touch. In the little trembling mouse, with its delicate fur of multitudinous sensitive hairs, general tactility is raised to a very high power.

Man, although he has lost much of his ancestral hair covering, is provided with hundreds of thousands of touch

organs, more, indeed, than seem necessary, as though nature had provided a reserve for the future development of his sensibility. Our whole cutaneous and subcutaneous tissue and mucous membrane are equipped with pressure cells, bulbs, and corpuscles, of various shapes and uses. Over a million delicate nerve fibers lead from these sensitive points to the spinal cord, and every pressure point associated with over a half million hairs gives a sensation qualitatively distinct. Besides this the extensive linings of our viscera are supplied with various tactile organs, and it may be that our very organic sensations which arise on internal stimulation are only special varieties and combinations of tactile impressions. Furthermore, there are extremely important pressure or touch end organs within the voluntary muscles themselves, and in the sensitive joint surfaces on which these muscles operate, and in the tendons to which they attach. The stimulation of this group of organs produces our tactile-motor or kinæsthetic sensations, which make us aware of all our movements of the fingers, arms, tongue, etc. Closely identified are the sensations of strain occasioned by muscular activity in overcoming resistance; and when the muscular activity is cadenced, we have the sense of rhythm. Thus our whole physical organism from finger tips to tendons and vitals is literally possessed by a myriad of tactile neurons. No other sense has such a wide domain. No other sense lies at once so all-pervadingly close to our personality and to our realization of the objective world. Tactility is the very essence of reality.

Consciousness of the outside world, and of the bodily self, begins with the vague tactile impressions of mouth, cheek, and body enjoyed by the baby when nestled in its mother's arms. In the early weeks the child is merely a passive receptor of tactile stimuli, and his attention does

not rise above the plane of staring and wonder. But his nervous system, developing at a rapid pace, prompts him and enables him in due time to be actively curious and to accumulate tactile experience on his own initiative. This is active attention and active touch. He begins to reach, to clasp, to creep, to walk, to tear, to build up. He gets into mischief and into a knowledge of things, and chiefly through the ceaseless manipulation of his prehensile organs, the hands. These are really end organs of perception of supreme importance. Nothing in the long onward march of the human species was more helpful and potential than the releasing of these organs from the brutal use of locomotion for manual dexterity and contrivance. Indeed, the contact experiences resulting from manipulation constitute the very core of thinghood." The lower animals, in their manipulation, are limited to such clumsy organs as beaks, paws, claws, and jaws, and Professor Mead has raised the question whether the capacity of clear perception of physical things is therefore not limited to man.

When compared with sight and hearing, touch has been called an unintellectual sense, but such a statement is seriously misleading. The most fundamental data for our perception of distance, direction, size, and form come through the feel gate. Only handling and manual activity can put vividness and content into the perceptions of the outside world. The child must begin in very infancy its acquaintance with the resistance and construction qualities of paper, sand, cloth, wood, etc. By gradual stages he gets farther and farther into the heart of things, and learns the essentials of what engineers call the materials of construction. If his opportunities are good, he will by tools learn the individuality of various woods, cardboard, leather, wire, fibers, clay, glass, stone, wool, cotton, and by dabbling